1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to point-to-point or point-to-multipoint wireless communications systems. More specifically, the present invention relates to systems and methods for the coordination of the sharing of a sequence of images or other media among users of wireless communication devices.
2. Description of the Related Art
In wireless telecommunication devices, such as cellular phones, PDAs, mini-laptops, and advanced pagers, the devices typically communicate over long distances by bridging telephone calls through existing cellular telephone networks and passing data packets across the network. These wireless devices have limited to significant data processing and computing capability, and can accordingly send and receive data, in addition to voice, across the telephone network.
There exists a wireless telecommunication service that provides a quick one-to-one or one-to-many communication that is generically referred to as “Push to Talk”, PTT (which can be push-to-talk over cellular “PTT PoC”) capability. The specific PTT group of recipient devices for the communicating wireless device is commonly set up by the carrier. A PTT communication connection is typically initiated by a single button-push on the wireless device that activates a half-duplex link between the speaker and each member device of the group and once the button is released, the device can receive incoming PTT transmissions once the button is released. In some arrangements, the PTT speaker will have the “floor” where no other group member can speak while the speaker is speaking Once the speaker releases the PTT button, any other individual member of the group can engage their PTT button and they will have the floor.
PTT systems allow for a voice communications connection to be established in a very short amount of time in a half-duplex channel, but the sending of non-voice data through the channel can be problematic as the size of data is variable and large data can choke the channel and stall communications. Furthermore, because the PTT system allows for one-to-many communications, a stall in data transmission can hinder group communications.
There exists a wireless telecommunications service that provides for a way for a user to send an image, video, audio or other media to a second user. In a typical use, such as via a protocol like multimedia messaging system (“MMS”), the media is sent to a wireless communications device, and then the sender has no way of controlling how the media is used. In such a use, normally, the first user selects the media to send and the recipient of the media and determines when the media is sent by virtue of when that user manually chooses to send the message. When the media arrives at the wireless telecommunications device of the second user, the first user no longer has control over the media. The media may sit on the second user's wireless communications indefinitely, or the second user may choose to view the media in a variety of ways.
There also exists a way of sending media for intentional sequential view by a user of a wireless communication device, such as a “slide-show” of images. In such a system, the data is streamed continuously to the user's device, which decodes the stream and displays the image series transmitted by the first user. While the existent system allows for a plurality of images to be displayed, it is not efficient for use in a resource-constrained wireless interface.
It is desirous to provide a system and method that can address a situation where there are a group of people linked by wireless communication devices, and a user wishing to share a set of media, like a slide-show, with the group and control the actions of the media at the recipient devices.